‘The Strangers: Chapter 2’ Interview: Director Renny Harlin

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‘The Strangers – Chapter 2’ Panel At San Diego Comic-Con International 2025 at San Diego Convention Center on July 24, 2025 in San Diego, California. Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Lionsgate.

Opening in theaters on September 26th is the sequel to last year’s remake of ‘The Strangers’ entitled ‘The Strangers: Chapter 2’, which was directed by Renny Harlin (‘Die Hard 2’ and ‘Cliffhanger’), and stars Madelaine Petsch (‘Riverdale’), Gabriel Basso (‘The Night Agent’), and Ema Horvath (‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’).

Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with director Renny Harlin about his work on ‘The Strangers: Chapter 2′, where the new movie starts off, revealing the Strangers’ backstory, and the challenges of shooting Chapters 1-3 at the same time.

Related Article: Renny Harlin Talks ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ and the Franchise’s Future

‘The Strangers – Chapter 2’ director Renny Harlin.

Moviefone: To begin with, can you talk about where ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ left off and where we find Maya when ‘Chapter 2’ begins?

Renny Harlin: Our whole concept for the three chapters was that we would take the original movie, use it as a premise in our first chapter, set the stage, and play with the idea of what if the female lead didn’t die as she apparently did in the original movie? What if she didn’t die? What would happen the next day? Basically, these three movies that we made take place in four days, and it’s like one, four-and-a-half-hour movie that is chopped up into three pieces. So, we left her in the first movie with her fiancé having been brutally murdered by these home intruders, but she doesn’t die. We find her in a local little hospital in the same town where the murder has happened. She wakes up in the hospital and she realizes her fiancé is gone, and she’s survived, but things are about to get much worse.

‘The Strangers – Chapter 2’ opens in theaters on September 26th.

MF: Can you talk about your choice to explore the backstory of the Strangers in this chapter?

RH: Well, we felt that there were two parts to this mystery. One was exploring our final girl, our survivor, Maya, and her psychological landscape. Where do you go after this brutal event, and when it continues, are you going to just fall apart and give up, or are you going to fight or flight? Then the other side of the coin is the Strangers, is the movie is called ‘The Strangers’. You can ask the people who go into this town, are they the Strangers, or are the killers, the Strangers? Anybody can have their own opinion, but we wanted to explore them more, and I think the great thing about the original movie and our whole series is that there’s no rhyme or reason for these crimes. We’re not going to explain why this person does this. It’s not because this event happened to them and its revenge or something like that. Serial killers don’t have any motive except that they are serial killers, and they usually pick their victims randomly. So, we wanted to look under the hood a little bit and give the audience some clues to what makes these people tick. In the second movie, you’ll find out maybe something about the identities and then in the third movie, you will find out a lot more. But why they do it and so on, will probably always be a mystery, because it is the randomness of these attacks that is so terrifying, and that’s how most of these kinds of horrible killings happen all over America, unfortunately, in real life.

Madelaine Petsch as Maya in ‘The Strangers — Chapter 2’. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate.

MF: Finally, can you talk about the challenges and the advantages of shooting three movies at once?

RH: Absolutely. It was a challenge. It was a privilege and a challenge, because as a filmmaker, when do you get to explore your characters for four and a half hours in one go? Never. On the other hand, the fact that we were shooting three movies together, we couldn’t shoot chronologically. We couldn’t say, let’s shoot movie one now and then movie two and then movie three. To make it economically, and practically viable, we must use whatever locations we had in common between the movies, and there were some key locations that play a part in each movie. For example, the house, you know, it’s a home invasion. So, the first movie takes place almost entirely in the house. Then that house will still play a certain kind of a role in the subsequent movies, but, much smaller. Then there are some other locations, a hospital or the diner in the town that will appear in all the chapters. When we were in the house, we were going to shoot everything in the house. That means that sometimes we could be shooting Monday morning, we could be in the second chapter and Monday afternoon in the first chapter and then Tuesday morning in the third chapter. It was challenging for everybody in the crew, from the makeup and the art department to wardrobe, and to the actors, of course, and especially to Madelaine, having to emotionally be able to go from one place to another like this quickly. For me to keep track of like, okay, where are we in the story, what’s happening now? What’s the tempo, what’s the style? Where are the characters emotionally? So, I made this chart where I went through all the three scripts, or the one very long script, then charted exactly where I think the character is emotionally in each scene. Because if you have a dramatic scene, she’s screaming and she’s crying. But then when you string those scenes together, you will end up with just like one big crying and screaming thing for one and a half hours. So, you must dole it out in the right amount and doses and the key was really to always remember, where are we emotionally now? Are we at the low or the high or the middle or whatever?

Madelaine Petsch as Maya in ‘The Strangers — Chapter 2’. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate.

What is the plot of ‘The Strangers: Chapter 2’?

The Strangers are back – more brutal and relentless than ever. When they learn that one of their victims, Maya (Madelaine Petsch), is still alive, they return to finish what they’ve started. With nowhere to run and no one to trust, Maya must survive another horrific chapter of terror as The Strangers – driven by a senseless, unceasing purpose – pursue her, more than willing to kill anyone who stands in their way.